KM in Education

Free PDA Simulations from MIT

MIT's Teacher Education Program (TEP) has developed some free PDA simulation games based on undergraduate research projects. The games with descriptive names like Big Fish-Little Fish or Virus provide students with experiential lessons in genetics, economics, evolution, and game theory.

Also don't miss TEP's links to other interesting projects, such as their indoor and outdoor augmented reality simulations that link real-world experiences to information supplied by handhelds. Mystery @ The Museum is a futuristic simulation that resembles the old-fashioned board game Clue.

Sharing instruction through curriculum mapping

While speaking with a charter school start-up today, I learned of their recent selection of a curriculum mapping tool to enable collaboration and sharing of instruction planning and assessment among teachers and administration. I decided to learn more about curriculum mapping and have summarized below what I found.

Curriculum mapping appears to have grown out of the pioneering ideas in Heidi Hayes-Jacobs' book, Mapping the Big Picture: Integrating Curriculum and Assessment K–12. In her first chaper, she writes:

With so little real-time data available, we find two polarized tendencies. One is to become rigid and lock step with curriculum guides, giving the impression that all is under control. The second is to become so loose and vague that no one seems to have a clue as to what is going on.

To make sense of our students' experiences over time, we need two lenses: a zoom lens into this year's curriculum for a particular grade and a wide-angle lens to see the K–12 perspective. The classroom (or micro) level is dependent on the site and district level (a macro view)....We need to change the process used in making curriculum decisions because most curriculum committees are ineffective at actually producing work that directly affects student performance.

What Dr. Jacobs proposes is a method that transforms curriculum planning into a vehicle for communication, collaboration and ongoing dynamic review of instructional planning. She also introduces the novel approach of taking a student's perspective in looking at the curriculum holistically and longitudinally to identify redundancies or gaps.

The first two chapters of Dr. Jacobs book provide a good overview of the process and reasons behind curriculum mapping. For a good primer on curriculum maps and different models, consult Least Tern's presentation.

The market for curriculum mapping is fast evolving, as many sites list outdated names and links. The major players all make reference to Dr. Jacobs' methodology as the basis for their design.

Among the more recognized curriculum mapping tools, I found:
AEL's Curriculum Creator - Curriculum Mapping & Design Tool
Atlas Curriculum Management System
Techpaths
WestJam's Curriculum Mapper

Additional players include:
Scantron's Curriculum Designer
Schoolution's MyLessonBuilder and CurrMapper

Beyond these vendors, many organizations such as NCREL and individuals offer consulting services for curriculum mapping.

Dr. Jacobs' site for curriculum design offers further resources.

TFA Teachers Blogging

Today, while scanning my visitor stats, I discovered the Teachers' Lounge. I found it a highly appropriate follow-up to my posting about Teach for America (TFA) as a spark for innovation in public education. The Teachers' Lounge Wiki was created by current TFA member Rob Lucas. As he explains it:

Over the course of last year, my first year of teaching, I spent many a late night planning lessons for the following day. During those nights, a single thought gnawed at me: Thousands of other teachers across the country were doing just as I was, and thousands more had done so every year for decades. Yet there was no way for me to fully benefit from the experience of all those who had come before.

I’ve created this website to change that. It’s a new type of collaborative website called a 'wiki,' where most pages can be edited not just by a webmaster, but by any registered user. That means you can post lesson plans, links, handouts, PowerPoint presentations—virtually anything!

It is this blend of entrepreneurism, familiarity with technology, and understanding of educational challenges that generates innovation in education today. The next challenge for these education innovators will be to disseminate their successes into classrooms beyond their immediate reach.

Who Knows What - Who's Accountable?

One challenge that should be addressed in the next few years is helping educators, administrators and those who support them to quickly tap sources of expertise. Currently most people leverage their professional networks to locate the person or information they want. With the number of reform efforts, foundations, for example, express frustration at not knowing who is currently funding or planning to fund specific areas, so they can best determine their grantmaking strategies. At the district or charter management organization level, schools that are successful in certain areas should share their experience and strategies so other similar schools do not reinvent the wheel.

If all these entities belonged to one large corporation, say USAEducation, in the interest of minimizing redundancy and therefore costs, USAEducation executives would mandate building of processes and tools to ensure that expertise is shared throughout the corporation, not recreated for every similar issue that pops up per school, district, state, or foundation.

Unfortunately, our education system is not designed in such a way so that some entity, even the U.S. Department of Education, feels accountable for being cost-effective across the sector. Perhaps transformational change across the education sector will occur when an organization finally assumes that level of responsibility.

Ending insularity to achieve high performance

The Bay Area School Reform Collaborative, also known as BASRC, is currently working on a best practices study drawn from high-performing classrooms, schools and districts. According to Ida Oberman, BASRC's Director of Research and Evaluation, among the study's findings is a pattern of high performance facilitated through knowledge accessed from the outside. High performers tend to tap into external knowledge sources.

This pattern should not be surprising. The first chapter of Bill Ouchi's Making Schools Work touches on this pattern in the transformation of one of the worst-performing elementary schools in Chicago into a high-performing school. In the process, teachers at the school conducted research and imported a reading program from New Zealand to help children who are in danger of falling behind. Their willingness and readiness to adopt best practices from outside certainly contributed to their success.

By encouraging and helping more schools and districts to look beyond themselves and their communities in order to identify best practices for their students, we should be able to improve student achievement without reinventing the wheel.

Capturing that whiteboard

Have you ever wished you could just whisk your whiteboard notes into a computer? I saw it done once with a handy device a client pulled out of his briefcase a few years ago. Then I forgot all about it until I stumbled across this.

Introducing Virtual Ink's Mimio. Mimio is a portable device that attaches to a whiteboard and enables you digitally record, copy and print anything you write or draw in that blank space. I'm not very familiar with the market, but am frankly surprised it hasn't taken off faster. Perhaps it's that $799 price tag that they refer to as low-cost on their website.

That hefty price tag is probably one reason that Virtual Ink has sponsored a monthly giveaway contest. They are giving away one Mimio free every month to the educator, student or administrator who submits the most creative, innovative idea for how to use the Mimio. Not a bad approach for conducting direct market research and generating innovative ideas pretty cheaply!

Teaching with Tablet PCs

The New York Times recently published an article on tablet PC's that suggested:

the most promising area so far is in the classroom, a setting in which portable devices with handwriting capabilities would seem to make sense.

While the classroom may seem to be an area of promise, considering the price differential and relatively similar functionality to handhelds, it is hard for me to see tablet PC's becoming a mainstream trend in education. The price is currently prohibitive to most schools running from $1350 to almost $2000 per device. Other than its handwriting capabilities, the tablet PC's offer few additional features compared to handhelds. Handhelds offer the same functions for taking notes, reading, integration into curricula, internet access, student polling and collaboration. While a handful of private schools are buying up tablet PCs, public schools and districts are exploring the handheld world more deeply.

If tablet PC technology really wants to take off in education, it will need to first make some major changes to its price point and functionality before mainstream educators choose it over handhelds.

Teacher feedback - using our heads or our feet?

I reconnected this past weekend with some of my former classmates from INSEAD at Pomelo in San Francisco. After chatting with them about shared friends and experiences, I remembered how my INSEAD experience also included the first time I had seen students voting with their feet.

I imagine a professor's worst nightmare must include showing up for a lecture prepared and finding only a handful of students willing to return to their course. I was one of three students sitting in that empty amphi while the beleaguered visiting professor bravely smiled and continued his lecture as if we were a full class of 70.

This experience exemplifies the lack of appropriate constructive feedback mechanisms in the education system. In order for graduate students to feel that their only point of recourse is to boycott the lecture hall, effective feedback processes clearly fall short. In higher education, course evaluation surveys mid-way and at the end of a course allow students to rate professors and provide constructive feedback. Such feedback is of limited use given its extended timeline and general nature. Furthermore, a clever professor could easily manipulate the system with strategic use of testing and grading. Feedback is also often collected from observations by other professors or teaching assistants. K-12 education offers even fewer feedback channels.

Although my classmates successfully achieved their objectives by boycotting the classroom, it is certainly an extreme feedback strategy that I would not wish on any teacher. Teachers can often learn as much, if not more, than students in their classroms, and higher education, as well as K-12 schools, should view effective feedback mechanisms as a very real opportunity for improving teacher quality. One promising avenue to watch is handhelds in classrooms, for example, in a Texas school district, where teachers and administrators can more easily identify strengths and weaknesses in teaching strategies, and in university lecture halls, where professors can instantly assess student comprehension and receive student questions via the Next Generation Mobile Classroom project. These innovations would not have helped my disgruntled classmates, but I remain optimistic that, in the near future, we will see more opportunities for students, parents and the community-at-large to provide direct feedback on the quality of teaching.

A New Voice

I'm back from my extended Labor Day break - and have plans to inject this blog with some more creative and personal elements. I haven't decided quite what topic yet, but I was inspired with Bill Ives' weekend food series, featuring a different city each weekend. He has solicited friends to contribute for different cities around the world, starting with a 3-part piece for San Francisco over Labor Day weekend and Zurich last weekend.